All posts tagged The National Gallery

Introduction

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born near Arezzo, in Tuscany, in 1475. At age 13 he was sent to study art in Florence, the greatest centre of art and learning in Italy, where he was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing and portraiture. Here he imbibed the Florentine principles of meticulous figure drawing and careful planning of a composition.

Sebastiano Luciani, later nicknamed del Piombo, was born ten years later in 1485 in Venice. He became a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and then of Giorgione. From the latter, especially, he absorbed a more improvisatory approach to composition, combined with a soft almost misty use of light, along with the traditional Venetian emphasis on gorgeous colour. (The greatest colourist of all, Titian, was born in Venice just 5 years later.)

In 1511 Sebastiano arrived in Rome whose art world he found riven with rivalries, especially that between the established genius, Michelangelo, who was hard at work painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (a commission which took from 1508 to 1512) and his main rival, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino – otherwise known as Raphael – born in 1483, who was soon to be commissioned to paint the walls of the nearby Vatican library.

Michelangelo never liked oil painting; he was more a sculpture or a creator of frescos. He quickly realised that Sebastiano was the only oil painter in town who could take on Raphael, so there was a strong element of calculation in his befriending of the younger man. Sebastian, for his part, was able to work with the greatest genius of the age.

It was the start of a 25-year-long friendship, which included a long correspondence, and collaboration on a number of major commissions. This exhibition features seventy or so works – paintings, drawings, sculptures and letters – which are masterpieces in their own right, shed light on the working practices of both men, and chronicle a unique friendship at the height of the Renaissance.

Differing approaches

Their differing approaches are epitomised in the first of the show’s six rooms by two unfinished works. Michelangelo is represented by a painting of The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (‘The Manchester Madonna’). Note the careful composition, the adult figures and child figures in neat rows, and the high finish of the human skin, almost like sculpted stone.

Compare and contrast with Sebastiano’s Judgement of Solomon. It’s possible to see, on the unfinished legs of the figure at right, various other postures which have been tried out and superseded. Also the faces are much softer and misty, something which is especially clear on the face of the mother on the right.

Collaborations

1. The nocturnal Pieta

Lamentation over the dead Christ, also known as the Viterbo Pietà (about 1512-1516) was Michelangelo and Sebastiano’s first collaboration. Michelangelo did the design and detailed sketches of the figures (sketches which can be seen here, next to the finished work) while Sebastiano actually painted it, adding the background landscape characteristic of Venetian art. (Compare and contrast with the softness of the figures and the mysterious background in the famous Tempest of Sebastiano’s teacher, Giorgione). In fact, this is, apparently, one of the first nocturnal landscapes in European art.

For my money, by far the best thing about it is the body of Christ. It has the best of both artists – Michelangelo’s sense of structure and musculature, softened by Sebastiano’s smooth oil technique.

2. Raising of Lazarus

There are several stories about this painting.

1. It was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in Rome, who simultaneously commissioned a ‘Transfiguration’ from Raphael. The Lazarus was taken to Cathedral of Narbonne, where Giulio was cardinal.

2. Raphael’s Transfiguration is arguably the better painting, in terms of the drama of its structure and composition. The Sebastiano comes over as more cluttered and cramped. In fact the reproduction below makes it look better – more dramatic – than it is in real life, where it feels immense and overpowering.

3. X-ray photography has shown that Sebastiano changed the posture of some of the figures. The audioguide suggests that Michelangelo dropped by after the initial outline was created, and suggested changes to make it more dramatic e.g. the arm of Lazarus (bottom right) originally stretched out towards Christ and his head was further back. Changing the arm and head positions makes his figure more dynamic.

4. Lastly, the painting came into the ownership of the British collector Sir George Beaumont who, in turn, left it to the nation in 1824, in the collection which was to become the foundation of the National Gallery. All the NG’s works are numbered and this painting is actually the very first in the catalogue – NG1.

3. The Borgherini chapel

The Borgherini Chapel was commissioned by Michelangelo’s friend and broker, the Florentine banker Pierfrancesco Borgherini (1488–1558) and was created inside the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome.

The frescoes showing The Flagellation of Christ and The Transfiguration were painted by Sebastiano. Michelangelo was slated to provide the designs, but left Rome for Florence after only providing drawings for the central Flagellation and possibly a layout for the Transfiguration. The entire wall and alcove of the chapel has been recreated using state-of-the-art digital technology by Spanish workshop, Factum Arte.

The composition is in three levels: centre bottom is Christ being flagellated; above in the ceiling is Christ rising to heaven; above that is the coat of arms of Pierfrancesco Borgherini. He is flanked by three sets of ‘authorities’: on the lowest level, by Saint Peter (left) and Saint Francis of Assisi (right) (the namesakes of the sponsor); to either side of the transfigured Christ are Moses (left) and Aaron (right); above, on the flat wall, are St Matthew (left) and Isaiah (right). It is these last two figures which are most reminiscent of Michelangelo; they could both have come straight from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The exhibition’s digital recreation of the alcove at the Borgherini Chapel in the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome, featuring designs by Michelangelo but painted by Sebastiano del Piombo

It’s only mentioned a few times, mainly in reference to the stunning over-life-size sculpture of Jesus by Michelangelo which is displayed here in two versions, but I was fascinated to learn how the image of the resurrected Christ was an object not only of anatomical beauty but of philosophical and theological inspiration for these artists and contemporary humanist reformers. The perfection of the naked body, as first created by Greek sculptors 2,000 years earlier, embodied a perfection of moral and theological being to which all humans could aspire. Hence there is a kind of luminous perfection of Michelangelo’s sculptures.

Catholic Christianity and its discontents

It’s sort of obvious, but all these works celebrate Roman Catholic Christianity, at its headquarters in Rome, working for its chief officer on earth, the Pope. As a Protestant I am always aware that these exquisite art works were produced with money mulcted from the peasants and poorest people of Europe by huge numbers of roaming tax collectors, penance providers, summoners and pardoners of the kind satirised by Chaucer over a hundred years earlier, and whose cynicism and corruption so disgusted the monk Martin Luther that he undertook a sweeping condemnation of the entire structure of the church and its underlying theology.

These years of glorious artistic achievement also saw the start of what came to be known as ‘the Reformation’, triggered when Luther nailed his 95 theses against the church to the door of his local church in Wittenberg in 1517.

Luther’s theology was diametrically opposed to the optimistic humanism of Michelangelo and many of the other artists of the High Renaissance. While they thought humans could aspire to an almost supernatural perfection – bodied forth in their immaculate statues – Luther emphasised the irredeemably fallen state of degraded sinful humanity – incapable of anything, any action, any moral behaviour, any thoughts of beauty, without the all-powerful grace of God to lift us.

The sack of Rome

The Reformation itself doesn’t impinge on any of these works, but the chronic instability of central Europe certainly does. For the cardinal who commissioned Sebastiano’s Raising of Lazarus went on to become Pope Clement VII, ruling from 1523 to his death in 1534. In the interminable conflict between the Holy Roman Emperors (in this case, Charles V), the Papacy and the rising power of France, Clement made the mistake of allying with France. This led a large mercenary army of Charles V to lay siege to Rome and, on 6 May 1527, to breach the city walls and go on a week-long rampage of looting, raping, killing and burning.

Clement retreated to the enormous Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was accompanied (presumably among many others) by Sebastiano who forged a close friendship with him. Before and after the siege Sebastiano painted several portraits of Clement. As a result, in 1531 Clement appointed him piombatore, or keeper of the lead seal which was used to seal papal messages. It was a lucrative sinecure paying a stipend of some eight hundred scudi and explains why in later life he was nicknamed ‘del Piombo’, which translates literally as ‘of the lead’ and, more figuratively, as ‘of the seal’.

End of the friendship

Raphael had died suddenly, very young (aged 37) in 1520, at which point Sebastiano became the leading painter in Rome. During the 1520s he gradually lost his Venetian style, adopting more monumental forms and a cooler range of colour. According to Michelangelo’s friend, the painter and great historian of Renaissance art, Giorgio Vasari, Sebastiano grew increasingly lazy, addicted to gaming and drinking.

His friendship with Michelangelo seems to have ended in the mid-1530s. Michelangelo had spent much of the 1520s in Florence, carrying out various commissions for the Medici family. In 1534 he returned to Rome and to a major commission to paint the end wall of the Sistine Chapel with the scene of the Last Judgement. The story goes that Michelangelo asked his old collaborator to prepare the wall for him, but that Sebastiano prepared it to be painted in oil – using a technique he had developed in Michelangelo’s absence. Apparently, Michelangelo was furious, had Sebastiano’s preparatory work torn down and insisted on doing the fresco his way.

Maybe. But Michelangelo was notoriously touchy. As the historian who is interviewed on the audioguide put it, Sebastiano had a longer run than most friends of the irascible genius, possibly because through most of the 1520s they’d lived in different cities. Maybe it was simply living in the same city again, that led to an inevitable break.

The works of art in this exhibition are stunning. But it can also be enjoyed as the story of a remarkable friendship; as giving fascinating insight into the compositional and painting techniques of the High renaissance; and as shedding an oblique light on the seismic contemporary events of the reformation and the Sack of Rome.

Although housed in just six rooms, it feels very, very full – of ideas, insights and breath-taking works of art.

Favourite

It’s easy to be over-awed by the brilliance, or certainly the size, of many of the works on display here. For me (the copy of) Michelangelo’s sculpted Pietà was head and shoulders better than anything else on display. It is an astonishing work and mind-boggling to realise that he made it when he was only 25!

But it would be easy to overlook the maybe thirty sketches and cartoons by both artists – the Michelangelo generally more forceful and energetic than the Sebastiano. My favourite work in the whole exhibition was Michelangelo’s Seated nude and two studies of an arm. I love sketches and drawings which emphasise structure and draughtsmanship. And I like unfinished works, which are full of mystery and suggestion. So this really pulls my daisy.

This is a very enjoyable, relaxing, easy-going exhibition. It’s small, with fewer than 50 works on display and a relatively short audioguide with only 15 items, meaning there is time to read and look and absorb all the works and then to stroll back through picking out favourites and re-examining them closely.

Australia’s impressionists

‘Australia’s Impressionists’ brings together paintings by three late-Victorian artists – Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder – who used new European ideas of painting in the open air to capture the urban and rural landscape of Australia. Their open air practice and the often quick, blurred finish of the works led to them being called ‘Australia’s impressionists’. They are joined here by a fourth Australian artist, John Russell, who spent most of his adult life in France, where he became friends with leading artists such as Monet and van Gogh, developing a genuinely European impressionist style and was even mentor to the young Matisse.

Tom Roberts (1856-1931)

Roberts was in fact born in England – in Dorchester, Dorset to be precise. His family emigrated to Australia in 1869. He returned to England to study art from 1881 to 1884 before returning to establish himself in ‘marvellous’ Melbourne in 1885. The wall label explains that Melbourne was an economic and social phenomenon, having grown from a few shacks in 1800 to become the second largest city in the British Empire by the 1880s, with bustling docks, warehouses and busy streets teeming with soldiers, shopkeepers, sheepfarmers and well-dressed ladies.

Thus one of the most arresting images in the show is Roberts’ Allegro con brio, Bourke Street West, an immense panorama of one of the busiest streets in Melbourne. The palette of duck egg blue for the sky overwhelmed by the sandy orange of the streets and buildings makes a tremendous impact as a depiction of an authentic Australian urban scene. But the title is important and symptomatic, too. Roberts had just returned from 4 years in London where he was much influenced by the Aestheticism of James McNeill Whistler, the pioneering American painter who gave his paintings titles from musical terminology like ‘Symphony’ and ‘Harmony’.

Although they were determined to paint the Australian scene, all three of these artists saw it with eyes conditioned by the latest developments in European art.

While in London Roberts painted the city in a kind of foggy, blurry style which recalls Monet’s London paintings (e.g. The Thames at Westminster (Westminster Bridge) 1871). These made a big impression on his contemporaries and several examples are included here. (My favourite one dates from a later visit to London but is a splendidly evocative miniature of the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square – all the more so since the visitor to this exhibition has just walked past this very scene.)

9 by 5 Impression Exhibition

In August 1889 Roberts helped to organise an exhibition of works by himself and colleagues in Melbourne. It was titled the ‘9 by 5 Impression Exhibition’ because many of the works were painted on the 9-inch by 5-inch lids of cigar boxes, an easy resource for poor artists. Although small, the sheer number of works (180-plus) in such a consistently shaky, blurry, swift, impressionistic style, made a big impact on critics (who didn’t like it) and fellow artists (who did). In some accounts the show is credited with marking the start of a genuinely Australian art. It was also distinctive for its fin-de-siecle and Aesthetic trimmings, with the walls of the gallery swathed in Liberty silks and the works bordered by large blocky frames, often painted a kind of modernist metallic tint.

Roberts brought back from Europe this taste for painting en plein air and did much to encourage friends and colleagues to do likewise, and to consciously depict the Australian scenery and life. He set up artists’ ‘camps’ in rural locations a train ride from Sydney or Melbourne (just as the French impressionists used the new suburban train network to go out to the suburbs of Paris to paint semi-rural scenes) although the commentary wryly points out that they weren’t exactly primitive, the one at Box Hill near Sydney having a separate ‘dining tent’ and even a piano installed.

As you explore the exhibition more you understand why the 9 to 5 works are placed right at the start – small, fleeting ‘impressions’ of urban scenes they may be, but they soon give way to large and sometimes enormous works depicting the countryside near Melbourne and Sydney.

Given that sheep farming was one of the fundamental activities in Australia it’s striking how few images of it there are in the exhibition. A Google search shows that Roberts did do many sheep-related paintings, including ones of herding and shearing, but there’s only one here, a big and dramatic composition, Break away! in which the mounted farmer is trying to stop sheep bolting for a dried-up waterhole during a drought.

This is a strikingly naturalistic work, concerned to give a realistic depiction of every detail, for example of the horse’s sweating coat, the cowboy’s lean, his braces, every detail of the fence. It’s great fun but it isn’t really impressionism.

Charles Conder (1868-1909)

Conder was also born in England, in Tottenham, north London. After a boyhood in India he was sent to Australia in 1884. In 1888 he moved to Melbourne where he met Roberts and Streeton. A notable early work is Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay. Note the high vantage point, as used by Roberts in the Bourke Street painting, the smudginess of the clouds and smoke from steamships, the sheen of rain on the dockside. But I saw more of L.S. Lowry in this work than Monet.

In fact Conder went back to Europe in 1890, never to return to Australia, and became deeply involved in the Aesthetic movement, mixing with leading artists and writers of the day including Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Critics consider his later period less convincing than the earlier Australian paintings. Conder took part in the rural painting camps organised by Roberts outside Sydney or Melbourne. Towards the end of the show there’s a sequence of works by all three artists depicting beaches outside Sydney. Conder produced this work which became quite famous.

Points of interest include:

the text on the building at the right being cut off, as in contemporary photographs or the paintings of Degas who enjoyed chopping off objects mid-frame

the image is dominated not by a long sweeping beach but by the man-made walkway or bridge – bridges loom large in the works of the French impressionists and Whistler did a series depicting bridges of London in different moods

the (to us) absurd formality of these Victorian ladies and gents. The commentary picks up on Conder’s characteristic use of pink in the discarded parasol, ladies’ hat and newspaper held by the lying figure – I was more struck by the intense blackness of the top hat and the couple behind one of the bridge supports

Arthur Streeton (1867-1943)

Streeton was actually born in Australia, unlike the previous two who migrated there. The paintings of his here are among the largest, and the most evocative of rural Australia. This dramatic depiction of a mine works on what looks like a blisteringly hot day is initially striking for its scale, for the portrait format and for the brilliance with which he creates the slabby effect of hard rocks. It takes a while to focus on the small humans down at the entrance of the mine, and to realise that they are bringing out of an injured miner on a stretcher.

Streeton’s work is possibly the most accessible and enjoyable of the three. The second room of the show features a number of his really large paintings of rural Australia which make it look like paradise. Golden Summer was painted when he was just 21! painted at the artists’ camp at Heidelberg, outside Sydney, set up by him and Roberts. It was the first painting by an Australian-born artist to be exhibited at both the Royal Academy in London, in 1890, and the Paris Salon the following year, where it won an award. A reproduction can’t convey the size and the sheer sensual pleasure of this astonishingly assured masterpiece.

Nationalism

The commentary points out that the states of Australia only came together to form a nation in 1901. The late 19th century was a great era of nationalism in politics, an interest or concern or issue which spilled over into art, music and literature. And so, for Australian politicians, commentators and artists, there was a lot of debate about what made it a nation, what was ‘Australian-ness’ etc. The commentary points all this out but it would have been good to have more from the artists or maybe contemporary commentators on what they thought Australian-ness consisted of, what they thought the distinctive features of the Australian landscape, or light, or flora consisted of.

A handful of beach paintings are brought together later in the exhibition to show the distinctive white sand of beaches outside Sydney. But in fact one of the most striking things about the show is how European most of these paintings looked to me. My early impressions of Australia were formed by movies, specifically Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), or the TV series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (1968-70). Desert and drought and hard red rock, or lush sub-tropical suburbia.

Works like Streeton’s ‘Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide’ (painted when he was just 22) are lovely but don’t look anything like the Australia I grew up seeing. It could be somewhere in the Cotswolds. The fact that the title is a quote from Wordsworth emphasises the Englishness of the imagination which is creating it.

Naturalism

The entire exhibition is premised on identifying these artists as impressionists but I wondered. They remind me less of their French contemporaries and more of late-Victorian English naturalistic painters, as can be seen at the wonderful Guildhall Gallery. A painting like Golden Summer is not unlike some of George Clausen’s bucolic scenes of rural England.

How much these paintings are not really that impressionist is highlighted by the fourth member of the show –

John Russell (1858-1930)

Russell left Australia when he was 22, travelling to France where he made friends with the major painters of the day, including Monet and van Gogh. The section of 10 of his paintings here are completely unlike the preceding three artists.

Now this has the full French impressionist feel, vague and blurry blobs of very light and bright colours used loosely to create an impression of a scene. Also no people – unlike all the examples above. Streeton, Roberts and Conder also depicted people-less landscapes, but they are concerned with accurately depicting it, whereas Russell seems much more interested in playing with the possibilities of oil paint and colour – pushing, stretching and experimenting.

This can be seen in his many paintings of the Breton coastline where he settled and lived for decades. Here he used Monet’s tactic of painting the same scene multiple times at different times of day to capture different light and mood, in this example the cluster of rocks off the Breton coast named Aiguille de Coton.

As might be expected from a friend of van Gogh’s, Russell experiments with oil paint to express not what he literally saw in front of him but the psychological impact of colour. Similarly the big crude super-obvious brushstrokes are designed to emphasise the paintwork itself rather than the ‘subject’.

Russell’s bold colour experiments led to his work being included alongside those of André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck in the 1905 exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. A critic wrote that the works looked like they had been painted by ‘wild things’ or fauves in French, and this nickname was quickly applied to the movement which became known as Fauvism.

Russell’s section of the exhibition shows us hard-core French impressionism morphing into post-impressionism. One of the curators makes the case – in the very informative film which accompanies the exhibition and runs in a projection room off to one side – that Russell deserves to be better known and included in our accounts of late impressionism. Without doubt. But if you then walk out of his rather dazzling section and back past the restrained realistic works of Streeter, Conder and Roberts it makes you question the label ‘impressionism’ as applied to them. Plein air naturalism might be closer.

Ariadne

One of the most evocative images in the show is Streeton’s fabulous Ariadne (1895). For once this feels like a landscape which is impossible to confuse with England or even Europe. It could be a Mediterranean sky but the red rocks on the horizon and the mottled eucalyptus trees clearly indicate the Antipodes. No reproduction can convey the intimacy and power of this painting.

The commentary points out that it is typical of the French symbolism of the 1890s to deploy a mysterious, generally female, figure to point and focus a landscape, as is done here. But it’s only if you get really close to the painting’s surface that you can see details like the way the sandy beach is achieved by broad horizontal brushstrokes whereas the woman’s figure is made by vertical brushstrokes, as is the white of the tumbling surf. Or the way the vertical sweeps of the dress merge into the beach. The branches of the tree on the left are achieved with just one or two confident strokes. It is an astonishing masterpiece, and no surprise that this image was chosen for the posters and publicity for the exhibition.

Biography

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Lombardy in northern Italy in 1571 where he trained before moving to Rome at the age of about twenty. By the mid-1590s he was working regularly as a painter, pioneering a new realistic style depicting street life and interior scenes with people doing mundane things, eating, playing cards, sitting round a table – painted with a lavish attention to detail and with a spectacular use of light and shade to create drama and movement.

His breakthrough came in 1599, when he received a commission to paint the Calling of Saint Matthew and Martyrdom of St Matthew in the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. The public unveiling of these works a year later caused a sensation and led to Caravaggio’s instant fame. He quickly found wealthy patrons including the Roman nobleman Ciriaco Mattei (1542–1614) who commissioned both The Supper at Emmaus and The Taking of Christ (1602), brought together again in the exhibition.

All the records indicate he was an extremely difficult man, he argued with colleagues and patrons, was involved in several brawls and then, in 1606, murdered a man after an argument over a game of tennis. Caravaggio fled to Naples, where he soon exerted an influence over artists in that city with his light effects and dramatic compositions. He died from unknown causes in 1610, aged just 38.

Beyond Caravaggio

The key thing about this exhibition is that it is about Caravaggio’s influence on contemporaries and followers. Of the 50 paintings in the show, only six are by Caravaggio himself (and three of those belong to the National Gallery i.e you can see them free anytime). The six Caravaggios on display are:

Boy peeling fruit (1592)

Boy bitten by a Lizard (1595)

The Supper at Emmaus (1601)

The Taking of Christ (1602)

Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604)

Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist (1609)

A handful of others are represented by tiny photographs on the wall labels (e.g. Victorious Love, The Seven Acts of Mercy, The Musicians). But the majority of the show consists of works by contemporaries and followers.

The immediate and lasting impression is that none of them are a patch on Caravaggio. None of the other paintings are in the same league. Caravaggio’s paintings have:

beauty of detail as in the finish on the fruits and flowers or the beads of water on the outside of the glass vase in Boy bitten by lizard

the dramatic intensity of composition of a work like The Taking of Christ, where the eye has so many interesting directions to follow – along the shiny black armour of the soldier’s outstretched left arm, down Christ’s arms to his strangely locked hands, across the trilogy of heads from right to left, of Judas kissing, Christ looking down and one of his disciples crying out – or following the curve of the red cloak above Christ’s head around and back to the cluster of three soldiers’ heads with the white-faced lamp-holder clustering in among them.

In The Supper at Emmaus a whole raft of tricks are deployed to heighten the drama: the lighting highlighting Jesus’ face and casting his shadow on the wall; the outstretched arms of the disciple on the right indicating the depth of the picture plane and drawing us in; the spectacular figure of the disciple half-rising from his chair on the left – in front of this big picture in the flesh I was more and more impressed by this figure and the taut energy of his bent arms lifting his body from his chair. And the commentary made a neat point that even the basket of fruit on the right of the table is actually poised just over the edge of the table and, when you focus on it for a moment, makes you want to lean in and push it safely back onto the table.

Followers and inheritors

None of them are as powerful as Caravaggio; only a handful come close; some are very poor indeed. Particularly poor were:

Take Rutilio Manetti’s Victorious Earthly Love and compare it with Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (not in the exhibition but represented by a small colour photo). Manetti’s painting is horrible. What an ugly specimen his cupid is! The commentary does what scholarly commentary does on such embarrassing occasions and dwells at length on the objects symbolising the arts of music and painting and architecture or whatnot – evading the elephant in the room which is how astonishingly ugly and repellent the central figure is.

Compare and contrast with Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (1602), where the dramatic use of extreme light and shade, the stunning mastery of detail, for example the folds of flesh on the stomach, and the naughty impish face – every single element of the painting is by a master of his art, and barely thirty years old.

Amor Vincit Omnia by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1602)

Catholicism

Obviously all these Italian painters are committed Roman Catholics, and living in the Italy of the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition, when the Catholic church really established itself as a worldwide force for reaction, repression, torture and execution.

Quite a few of the paintings here bear out the English poet William Empson’s disgust for a religion which places the torture to death of a human being as its central icon. In The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew by Jusepe de Ribera the saint has been tied up and the figure on the left is sharpening the knife which he is going to use to cut the skin off the old man’s body. Nice. The commentary tells us that Ribera specialised in the flesh of old men and also attended lots of hangings, floggings and so on, to observe the effect of torture and evisceration on the human body.

Obviously the use of light and the way the saint is looking up into it, as if up to the light of heaven, is dramatic and striking. According to the curators this is due to Caravaggio’s example, though the raddled face of the flayer and even more so the figures behind him have more the weathered blurriness of Rembrandt, with which this painting is contemporaneous.

The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew by Jusepe de Ribera (1634) Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

More contemporary with Caravagio himself is The Ecstasy of Saint Francis by Giovanni Baglione from 1601. Look at the wooliness of the saint’s cloak – poor. Look at all three faces – bad. Any Catholic painting of saints or monks or nuns showing the whites of their eyes as they look up to their glorious Redeemer in heaven is revolting and it’s made ten times worse if there are angels hovering around.

Many of the paintings here rely on the viewer sharing the artist’s lachrymose Catholic sentimentality and/or taste for holy torture, as the original patrons and viewers, of course, would have. If you are a modern post-religious liberal and don’t share this sympathetic opinion of holy torture, then many of the works in the show seem clotted with brutality and/or weeping melodrama.

A striking and typically unpleasant example is Christ displaying his wounds by Giovanni Antonio Galli, called Lo Spadarino (about 1625-35). Very possibly the striking chiaroscuro i.e dramatic use of light and dark, was influenced by Caravaggio. But it seems a gross, tasteless, blatant image, at odds with the tastefulness which characterises all the master’s works.

A perverse combination of medieval torture with French sensuality comes in Nicolas Régnier’s Saint Sebastian tended by the Holy Irene and her Servant (about 1626). The musculature and depiction of the saint’s body is splendid, but the female figures look contorted and unreal, and the combination of their opulent contemporary dress and the figure on the left’s plump bosom give it an inappropriately soft porn feel, a wilting languorousness which is completely at odds with the dramatic intensity and strangely ascetic sensuality of Caravaggio’s best work.

Some of the works seem difficult to justify. In his earlier works Caravaggio painted street scenes and settings inside inns – ordinary folk playing dice, cheating each other at cards and so on. This is used as an excuse to hang a series of paintings on the same subject by contemporary and later artists, some pretty removed in style and feel from the master. Probably the most extreme example is The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs by Georges de La Tour (about 1634). There’s light in it, for sure; and it is a game of cards alright. But the peculiar stylisation of the faces and postures seems a million miles away from the intense realism combined with high drama and intense light effects of Caravaggio.

Compare and contrast with Caravaggio’s John the Baptist (1604), a masterpiece of simple striking composition, brilliant chiaroscuro, mastery of tone and palette (almost everything a variation on yellow, brown, orange) and the brooding intensity of the central figure – and a wonderful celebration of the beauty of the human body, specifically the young, male naked body. Seeing it in the flesh is breath-taking and worth the admission price on its own!

Conclusion

This is less an exhibition of Caravaggio than an opportunity to immerse yourself in the visual world of early 17th century painting in a show which highlights the strengths and weaknesses – mainly weaknesses – of his followers and copyists.

In every room where a Caravaggio original is hung it wipes the floor with the competition, many of which are interesting, some of which are pretty good – but none of them are masterpieces, none have the intensity, purity, drama and sheer skill with oil that Caravaggio was blessed with.

And after spending an hour and a half underground (the National’s main exhibition space is down a massive flight of stairs into a series of basements) in darkened rooms full of Roman Catholic images of humans being tortured, crucified, stabbed, speared, shot and hanged, it was quite a relief to emerge back into the open daylight of Protestant Trafalgar Square.

The germ of the idea came following Lucien Freud’s death in 2011 when heirs and curators had to deal with the collection of other artists’ works which Freud had accumulated over a long life. His collection prompted the question, What did he collect and why? And how, if at all, did the items in his collection influence his own practice? Which in turn gave rise to thinking about the personal collections of other eminent painters throughout history: How have painters drawn inspiration from the examples of their predecessors’ subject matter, treatment and style, which they happened to own?

Hence this exhibition selects eight famous artist-collectors and, as far as possible, not only explains why they collected, but gives us examples of works from their collections, along with their thoughts and writings on the act of collecting.

Thus the ten or so rooms of the show bring together, according to the National Gallery website, ‘more than eighty works spanning over five hundred years of art history, from Freud’s 2002 Self Portrait: Reflection to Bellini’s Agony in the Garden of about 1465′.

English

The first thing to notice is that only two of the list aren’t English (van Dyck becoming a sort of naturalised Englishman and Freud, though born in Berlin, taking British citizenship).

Following from this is the quick realisation, from just considering the first room, that a number of these paintings already hang in the National Gallery. A lot of these works you could see any day of the week for free. In other words, this is a canny way of displaying a lot of the NG’s collection but in a new and interesting context. On the other hand, nearly half the eighty works are on loan from elsewhere: Paris galleries for the Impressionists, from private collections and from HM Queen for some of the earlier paintings. Seen from this angle, the exhibition is a genuine opportunity to see works rarely if ever displayed in England.

In fact, the section on Lawrence goes further to make the point that Lawrence acted as advisor to several notable collectors, including Sir George Beaumont and John Julius Angerstein. Both of these men donated their collections at death to the British government, collections which formed the kernel of the National Gallery collection. So there is a side strand about the artist-collector Lawrence, who advised the aristocratic collectors, whose collections formed the basis of the collection of the gallery we’re standing in.

Chronology

In a familiar curator’s conceit the rooms and artists are arranged in reverse chronological order, starting with Freud (d.2011) and ending with van Dyck (d.1641). But, being old-fashioned or unafraid of curators’ fancies as well as knowing that I prefer older paintings, I simply began at the end – with the ‘last’ room, the van Dyck Room – and proceeded to ‘do’ the exhibition in reverse i.e. correct, chronological order.

Van Dyck (1599 – 1641)

Tate and the National Gallery have a lot of van Dyck’s because, although born in Antwerp (modern Belgium) van Dyck was invited to London by King Charles I in 1632 and stayed there until his death in 1641, making a living as a very successful portrait painter of the Royal Court and aristocracy.

A rarely seen van Dyck is on loan from the Queen’s collection, which again shows the importance of classical architecture/references in this kind of painting. Here the broken column between the two men symbolises the death of the wife of Thomas Killigrew (on the left) after just a few years of marriage. He is wearing her wedding ring on a black bracelet around his wrist and a silver cross of mourning hangs on his chest.

On a more intimate scale the show compares one of van Dyck’s self portraits with Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo (about 1510), comparing the similar positioning of body (away from the watcher) with head turned back. Note the way van Dyck is turning his back and lowering his cloak, in a way which would be flirtatious in a female nude, but in this painting the gesture a) reveals his skill at catching the play of light on the folds of black silk of his shirt and b) the great big golden chain around his neck: I am a brilliant artist and I am rich.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792)

Reynolds took himself immensely seriously (as you can tell from this self-portrait, posing with a bust supposedly by Michelangelo) making himself into the most successful portraitist of his day, dedicated to studying the European masters in order to raise the standards of British painting, helping to found and acting as first president of the Royal Academy. No surprise, then, that he amassed a large collection of European Old Masters to act as models and inspiration.

What comes over strongest in this section is the widespread misattribution of paintings in the past. The painting of Leda and the Swan which Reynolds thought was by Michelangelo is not now attributed to him at all. Reynolds thought a Bellini Agony in the Garden was by Mantegna; he thought van Dyck’s portrait of George Gage was a portrait of Rubens. Wrong in each case. Apparently, after his death, when his huge collection was assessed for sale, a contemporary described it as ‘swarming’ with fakes.

In a shock aside, the commentary also casually mentions that Reynolds routinely touched up paintings in his collection ‘to improve them’! That must be a risk very specifically related to falling into the hands of an artist who thinks he is qualified to ‘retouch’ a Renaissance masterpiece.

Reynolds didn’t collect many contemporaries but made an exception for his only equal, Thomas Gainsborough. A specific example shown here is the striking Girl with Pigs of 1782. Apparently, it’s a good example of the late trend of Gainsborough to paint landscapes with figures which Reynolds called his ‘fancy pictures’.

Fancy picture refers to a type of eighteenth century painting that depict scenes of everyday life but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. The name fancy pictures was given by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Thomas Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, particularly those that featured peasant or beggar children in particular. (‘Fancy picture’ on the Tate website)

So it’s the presence of the peasant girl, not the pigs, that makes it ‘fancy.

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769 – 1830)

I was blown away by the big exhibition of Lawrence’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery back in 2010. Now I learn that he was a compulsive collector, amassing some 5,000 works of which 4,300 were drawings. It helped a lot that the European art market was awash with art following the disruptions of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. War > plunder. ‘Twas ever thus.

The exhibition contrasted an enormous Renaissance cartoon he owned with the composition of the three figures in his portrait of the Barings.

To paraphrase the critic Richard Dorment, art historians love this triple portrait because it so cleverly incorporates references to group portraits by Titian and Reynolds. No doubt.

Going beyond the poses of the figures – which actually appeared a little clumsy to me – I was struck by the way classical pillars are included in this style of painting to add grandeur and authority – and to act as a doorway onto a distant landscape representing ‘the world’ which the rich people in the portrait are planning and controlling.

I much preferred his august and amused self-portrait, which I can’t find anywhere on Google images 😦

George Frederick Watts (1817 – 1904)

Watts is always touted as a giant of late Victorian painting but I think he’s by far the worst painter from the period. I once went on a pilgrimage to the Watts Gallery in Compton, a village near Guildford, and was desperately disappointed. His vaguely allegorical figures are mostly dark, brown and gloomy. He had a big collection and the show compares four tall slender paintings by the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot depicting four stages of the day – Morning, Noon, Evening and Night – with Watt’s own Autumn from 1903.

Sir Frederic Leighton (1830 – 1896)

Leighton and Watts are made to share quite a small room, which features a small self portrait by Leighton, as well as some works from his collection. In my opinion, Leighton deserves a room to himself featuring more of his work. The National Gallery has plenty as does Tate. Maybe it was too big to squeeze in.

Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917)

Odd that the two Victorians were squeezed together in one pokey room, whereas the collection of French Impressionist Edgar Degas sprawls over two large rooms, the biggest space dedicated to one painter-collector.

Degas was notorious for his addiction to buying art. He beggared himself in a compulsive need to acquire works by his famous contemporaries, often snapping up Impressionist works as soon as they were finished. And so one room was devoted to the Impressionists in Degas’s collection, including the usual suspects such Sisley, Pissarro and Gauguin, as well as the enormous work The Execution of Emperor Maximilian by Édouard Manet (1867 to 1869) which, after it was (inexplicably) cut up into sections by Manet’s wife’s son, Degas tracked down to various Parisian art dealer’s premises and partly reassembled.

In the second Degas room were mainly works by the two 19th century painters he reverenced, Delacroix for his use of colour, and Ingres for line. Apparently the young Degas met the old Ingres who told him, ‘Draw lines, young man, draw lines’. A man after my own heart.

In the welter of works in these two rooms the one that stood out for me was a portrait of Francis Poictevin by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1887). I very much like the solid line drawing, the draughtsmanship and the character which is captured of this aesthete and Symbolist writer.

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)

Matisse also collected works by older masters and contemporaries. Dominating his room is the famous Combing the Hair (‘La Coiffure) by Degas, which Matisse owned for 16 years or so before selling it onto the National Gallery (which is why it’s here). La Coiffure manages to be a masterpiece of both line and colour, the dark outline of the figures masterfully suggesting their corporeality and motion, but the deliberate use of shades of red and orange creating a sumptuous and dynamic image.

Away from this super-dominating image were two smaller works, which I liked. A small Gauguin, Young Man with a Flower behind his Ear (1891).

Lucien Freud (1922 – 2011)

And so, rather exhausted, to what the curators intend as the first room, which contains half a dozen works owned by the emigre German painter, Lucien Freud. Pride of place is given to Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L’Italienne) byJean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (about 1870), which I didn’t particularly like, finding the whole effect misjudged and drab.

And, although it’s on the main poster outside and all over the Tube, the gallery doesn’t provide for press use a copy of Freud’s self-portrait from 2002, striking, with the paint over his nose and veined hands looking as if it has bubbled with smallpox.

Having supped full of these horrors I strolled back through to the ‘end’ room to cleanse my palate with the smooth and lofty images of Sir Anthony van Dyke – though they themselves are not untainted by war and destruction. They just don’t know it yet…

‘The seeds of almost every art movement current in 19th century Paris were sown by artists copying and emulating Delacroix’s work.’

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was the leading exponent of Romanticism in French art, active from his first exhibition at the annual Salon de Paris in 1823 through to his last appearance in 1853. He pioneered a colourful, vibrant, spontaneous-feeling approach to depicting historical subjects, scenes from the ‘exotic East’, landscapes, nudes and still lifes.

I thought the title of this exhibition was a bit modish, that the tag ‘…and the rise of modern art’ could be applied to umpteen 19th century painters simply by living before the deluge of Modernism – but in fact the show completely convinces you that Delacroix really was instrumental in the rise of modern art.

It does this by avoiding a straightforwardly chronological survey of his career. Instead the exhibition consists of six rooms, each of which addresses a specific theme or subject – and then hangs Delacroix paintings from the 1830s, 40s and 50s next to works which strikingly resemble them, refer to them or incorporate their techniques, by artists of the next two generations, including Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky, along with the lesser-known Symbolist artists, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.

What the exhibition makes clear is that later artists didn’t just copy or learn from Delacroix in subtle and obscure ways, visible only to scholars and experts. They paid direct homage to him, copying his subjects and compositions and styles and ideas in ways which are immediately visible to even an untrained eye. They wrote letters, commentaries, essays and articles explicitly acknowledging their debt to him, and even made paintings showing him being levitated to heaven or showered with awards by a grateful posterity. As Cézanne, a really devout follower, said: ‘We all paint in Delacroix’s language’.

After Delacroix’s death the contents of his studio were sold off and revealed a wealth of previously unknown outdoors paintings, which had a strong impact on the young Impressionists who were just starting out on their careers. They found in Delacroix a liberation from the official Salon art of the day, the inspiration to capture the warmth and vibrancy of the everyday, the exotic, the exciting, instead of the glacial cool of the perfectly poised subjects concocted in the artist’s studio.

When a later generation wanted to move beyond Impressionism in the 1890s, Delacroix’s sometimes blurry use of paint pointed the way for Symbolist painters seeking misty, portentous shapes and mythological images – but also provided inspiration for the Post-Impressionists (Gauguin, van Gogh) who were interested in bold experiments with colour for its own sake.

And when his collected writings on art, painting technique and broader aesthetics were published in three volumes between 1893 and 1895, the depth and variety of ideas contained in their 1,438 pages crystallised Delacroix’s position as a key thinker, who could be plundered by all the various schools of modern art.

Rough not smooth

As his Wikipedia entry makes clear:

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form.

Rather than smooth perfection, Delacroix developed a technique of painting au premier coup, trying to complete a work in one sitting, or over a few days at most. This makes a lot of his paintings quite rough to look at – in fact not that many of the Delacroixs on show here are, in themselves, that appealing.

The above is a small-scale copy of the large original. The exhibition juxtaposes it with the The Eternal Feminine by Cézanne, pointing out the way that both works feature a still figure on a bed regarding the mayhem of activity around them.

Close up

Some paintings are best viewed from a distance, like a lot of the Impressionist works at the Inventing Impressionism show hanging in these very rooms a year ago. But if I learned one thing about Delacroix’s paintings it is that they are best looked at very close up. At medium distance often the composition looks a bit shabby, the figures not too convincing and the background sketched in. But really close up – a foot from the canvas – you can see the confidence of the quick, flicking brushstrokes.

Thus the poster for the show is a big close-up of a lion’s head, its glaring eye set among a mesh of bold strokes. But when you see the source work you realise the lion’s head is only about two inches square – tiny – and the overall impression a bit murky, the composition of the bodies very staged, the landscape in the background looking like waves.

Once I’d grasped this was the best way to enjoy Delacroix’s paintings, I spent more and more time with my nose a foot from the surface, marvelling at the dexterity and energy of the quick confident brushstrokes, in a way more entranced by them than by the ostensible subject matter. And looking at them this closely also helps you to understand why later painters found his approach so liberating: you can see the freedom of the way he paints echoed or repeated in Renoir, Cézanne and many others. There’s a particularly direct line from the Delacroix flecks and flicks of paint to van Gogh’s striking use of strong, well-defined, directional brushstrokes in bold unnaturalistic colours, having taken Delacroix’s example and turned it into a whole style.

Comparisons

So throughout the exhibition, we are invited to compare and contrast numerous originals by Delacroix with works by later artists which directly or indirectly pay homage or rework his themes, subjects or handling: especially the rough improvised handling of the paint, and the use of bright and unexpected colour.

The Battle of Love by Paul Cézanne (about 1880) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman, 1972.9.2. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

To reiterate, it’s not the brilliance of the finished compositions which are important – it’s the freedom of those swiftly administered flecking brushstrokes, and the bold use of colour, which later painters dwelt on.

Flowers

One particular Delacroix quote crops up several times in the wall panels – ‘The primary merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye’ – and this seems particularly appropriate to the room devoted to paintings of flowers, a modest but vibrant genre which Delacroix is credited with bringing back into fashion.

In this room hang just seven paintings and we can play the exhibition game of comparing a Delacroix from the early century with a selection of gorgeous paintings by his inheritors, including Gauguin, van Gogh and Redilon. Here’s a Delacroix flower painting:

And my favourite, Ophelia among the flowers by Odilon Redon. This is done with pastel on canvas and, close up, you can see how the crayon effect creates the misty washes of colour across the canvas, which add to the sense of mysteriousness but also to the sense of colour creating shapes fro its own logic.

Throughout the show, in the rooms devoted to landscapes, or his trip to North Africa, or music and aesthetics, there are many, many more beautiful paintings, including masterpieces by Gauguin and van Gogh and Monet and Cézanne and Signac and Matisse, a wonderful array of colour and composition which, one by one and systematically, not only validate the curator’s argument for the massive influence of Delacroix on later generations of artists, but are also objects of joy and wonder in their own right.

The Mural Projects

Most of the paintings in the exhibition are on the small side, the exception which proves the rule being the two life-size full length portraits by Delacroix and John Singer Sargent which I mentioned at the start.

The main surprise of the show is the revelation that Delacroix also created a range of enormous murals as public commissions, wall and ceiling paintings as big as Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel. They obviously can’t be packed up and shipped along to these exhibition rooms in London and so we learn about them in a dark room off to the side of the exhibition, in which a high quality US-made video is projected onto an enormous screen to show the vast panoramas Delacroix created for:

The Salon du Roi

The Library of the Deputy of Chambers

the Galère d’Apollon

The Chapel of Holy Angels, in the church of Saint-Sulpice

Conclusion

This is a lovely exhibition, which both proves its point and is also a sumptuous visual feast. At 63 paintings it is on the small side, which is all the better because it gives you time to really soak up some of the masterpieces on display.

The final painting is a direct tribute to Delacroix by Fantin-Latour, celebrating the unveiling of a monument to Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens. Delacroix’s name is just about visible in capitals at the bottom left, the skyline of Paris visible in the bottom right, but the dominant figure is the kindly goddess of Posterity sprinkling flowers – made doubly significant, as we have seen, because of the achievement of Delacroix’s own flower paintings – to immortalise his name.

A friend’s son is over from Spain. He’s studying art and so we spent one full day, from 10am till closing time at 6pm, on a mission to visit all 66 rooms in the National Gallery. We did it, and with 20 minutes left over to slip into the Goya exhibition as well.

The four sections

The Gallery holds some 2,300 works. They’re divided into four periods or themes, all of which are found in the 66 or so rooms spread over the gallery’s second floor:

Floor plan of level 2 Hover your mouse over a room to see its title and click through to a detailed listing.

NB Rooms 41 and 42 are closed, some of the paintings have been moved to rooms C, D and E on level 0. Floor plan of level 0

Audioguide

There’s an audioguide: it costs £4, covers almost every painting in the collection and takes 5 hours to listen to non-stop. Obviously, if you pause it to wander from picture to picture, have lunch or take a comfort break, it will take longer. Maybe reckon on doing one of the four themes or periods on each visit.

Personal highlights

As with my recent trip to the British Museum, these are obviously not any kind of official highlights, just a list of things that made me stop and think or admire or want to make a note:

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) (about 1499-1500) by Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519. The National Gallery, London.

Leonardo da Vinci The Burlington House Cartoon (1500) This is kept in a small darkened room by the entrance to the Sainsbury wing where you can sit and admire genius. It is worth visiting the National Gallery to see this one image. Has any artist ever made any image more perfect, more mysterious and profound than this one? Leonardo is in a class of one. If you had to explain Western art to a Martian this painting would do it.

The Wilton Diptych (1395-9) This was a portable altarpiece made for the use of King Richard II (1377-99). I like the sideways posture of the young king and the generally static, hieratic posture of the figures. A gallery attendant explained Richard has ginger hair and therefore so do the angels. I really liked the image of the white hart on the reverse, with a crown round its neck and a golden chain. It was Richard’s personal emblem and therefore it is stamped onto the chests of the angels’ astonishingly blue tunics, like the logo of a football team.

Jan van Eyck Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (1433) Next to the famous Arnolfini Portrait is this work. Like so many works of the northern Renaissance it is of a real person. No Christ child, Mary, angels, Magi, disciples or attendant saints. A real person commemorated for all time in their hereness, nowness, personhood.

Sandro Botticelli Venus and Mars (1485) Not really looking like any human beings ever seen, this is like a high class cartoon, complete with lines around the figures, and the stylised neck, jaw and hair of the woman.

Giovanni Battista Moroni – Portrait of a Gentleman (‘Il Gentile Cavaliere’) (1564) Not a beautiful man but the rendition is perfect in every detail, including the gold lining and buttons up the front, and the loose binding of the leather-bound books under his left hand.

Titian emerges as one of the great geniuses of painting. He seems to have introduced a new much brighter palette. His portraits of 16th century notables are striking and individualistic. But I was struck by the handful of outdoors paintings which seem to have created a new way of conveying the human figure in outdoor settings, complete with realistic trees and earth and streams, old ruined buildings, in a brown palette. Before him there was nothing like this and after him everything looked like this for centuries: the effect on Gainsborough, for example, seems obvious:

Paolo Veronese The Dream of Helena (1570) The posture of the dreaming woman is perfect and the light on the dress, shimmers impressionistically.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) A whole room is devoted to Poussin (room 19) and I thought it significant that it was almost empty (three people). I’ve read that Poussin is a very intellectual painter and appreciating him is a developed taste. But I find his paintings empty of all passion or feeling, the characters positioned in stylised gestures, the overall composition draining the mythical events depicted of all energy or meaning. They are like a kind of abstract idea of painting, specimens of what painting would be if drained of all passion or feeling:

Peter Paul Rubens (room 29) is famous for his plump women. Out of his big compositions I noticed his subjects’ black eyes, white breasts and shiny armour, all three exemplified in Minerva protects Pax from Mars (1630). In The Judgement of Paris (1632-5) the black eyes and white boobs are obvious, but the shiny armour is there in the bottom left, in the shield with an image of the Gorgon and a discarded helmet on the ground.

Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of Aechje Claesdr (1634) I like north European art because its humanism trumps the Mediterranean’s emphasis on Christian ideology. The compassion doesn’t come from choruses of angels or saints turning up their tearful eyes to heaven, but from the honest depiction of real people in all their frailty and humanity, deserving our empathy and compassion.

Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (1654-6) by Rembrandt. His mistress, apparently, young, fresh faced, innocent, her open chemise hinting at her warm body, the whole image exudes intimacy, trust and love.

The solid, thick-waisted, small-breasted Rubens women make the Rokeby Venus (1647-51) by Diego Velázquez in the next room (30) all the more striking, her very slender waist, narrow back and defined shoulder blades looking anorexic by contrast.

Frans Hal Portrait of a Young Woman (1650s) A real person, looking innocent and vulnerable. You expect her to start talking to you

Thomas Gainsborough The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat (1760) What could be lovelier, more charming, more innocent. After all the friars, monks, weeping saints and tortured Jesuses of the Spanish and Italian Baroque, coming into the Gainsborough gallery was like being able to breathe again. Generally, arriving in the English gallery with its trees, open country and educated landowners was a great relief: sun and air, trees and rivers and not a tortured, bleeding Christ in sight.

La Coiffure (about 1896) by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas. In last year’s Impressionism exhibition I was surprised not to like more Degas. But this painting seems to me a masterpiece: the combination of reds; the unfinished parts on the left; the heavy black lines giving a cartoon quality; the ordinary everyday subject matter; the two quiet women, not kings or gods or angels; the intimacy. A ragged modern perfection.

I learned…

Ugly babies There are a lot, a really huge number, of terribly painted babies masquerading as the little baby Jesus. I don’t think we saw one believable image of an actual baby, and so many horrid ones we started a competition to find the ugliest baby Jesus. From a strong field (eg Virgin and Child (1475) by Hans Memling) the winner was The Virgin and Child in a Garden (late 15th century) in the style of Martin Schongauer. Enlarge the image to savour the full horror of the old man baby.

Geniuses who died young

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael (1483-1520) aged 37.

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) aged 36.

Carlos’s Law All the Dutch winter landscapes under snow (room 26), of villages or towns with people ice skating on frozen rivers and so on, are immediately appealing:

My friend’s son is called Carlos and after he pointed this out we developed a hypothesis – maybe one day it will become Carlos’s Law – which is that: No painting of a winter scene can be bad. Or, Every painting of a winter scene is automatically good. This held pretty much true from the 17th century Dutch painters where it began to dawn on us, through the intervening centuries to the wintry Impressionist works at the end of the gallery eg:

Personal taste

Turns out I like medieval and Gothic art and don’t like the Renaissance. I like medieval art’s emphasis on the humane, on gorgeous or quirky detail, the prevalence of design and pattern over the clear and (to me) often empty or sterile backdrops which Italian Renaissance art uses to show off its mastery of perspective. Thus I prefer the tight composition, the symmetry, the packed and slightly claustrophobic feel, the sumptuous fabric and cracked floor tiles and the dense foliage climbing over the cloisters of The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor (1510) by Gerard David to, say, The Nativity (1470-5) by Piero della Francesca, with its – to me – sense of abandonment in a sterile, rocky, Beckettian landscape.

And so I preferred almost any northern Renaissance painter – van Eyck and the fabulous Hans Holbein and Rogier van de Weyden – to the more famous Italians, because they seem to me to be more humane; to value the truly human, often ungainly, individual over the more religious types of the Italian Renaissance. Botticelli’s Venus and Mars are smoothly executed cartoons: Robert Campin’s man and woman are people.

Goya (1746-1828)

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is often considered the last of the Old Masters. I have never been able to put him in the same class as Rembrandt or Vermeer, let alone the masters of the Renaissance, and this exhibition didn’t change my mind.

It is the first major exhibition of Goya’s portraits ever held. It was, according to the audioguide, ten years in the making as the curators negotiated the loan of works from major international galleries and many private owners, and I think we should be grateful for their efforts in bringing together an unparalleled 71 portraits, ranging from wall-sized commissions to tiny sketches and a set of family miniatures – all in one place as never before.

Biography

You can read Goya’s biography on his Wikipedia page. What was new to me was the detail the exhibition provided about Spanish politics of the second half of the 18th century and how Goya’s life intertwined with it:

After the glory years at the height of its empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain had sunk by the 18th century into being a cultural and economic backwater. During the later 1700s a group of liberal thinkers and politicians, taking their lead from the Enlightenment in France, wanted to modernise Spain and Goya very much befriended and took part in this group.

At the same time he was fiercely ambitious in his chosen career. In the 1780s King Charles III appointed Goya Painter to the King, despite its name, a relatively lowly position. In 1789, following the death of Charles III and the advent of Charles IV, Goya was promoted to Court Painter. And in 1799 Goya was finally appointed First Court Painter ie top dog. Via persistent lobbying and creating a network of aristocratic contacts, he had arrived.

But he did so as the continent of Europe sank ever deeper into prolonged war. By 1804 Spain, allied with Napoleonic France, was at war with Britain. In 1808 Napoleon’s troops seized major Spanish cities and Napoleon appointed his brother, Joseph, to the position of king of Spain. Guerilla resistance to the French invaders and their reprisals spurred Goya to create his terrifying Disasters of War etchings.

However, the French were liberals after Goya’s own heart: for example they abolished the Inquisition with its legal right to torture and execute anyone who had insulted the dignity of Spain or the Catholic church. Goya made many contacts within the French regime and painted some of its members.

The Duke of Wellington portraits

But in 1812 the Duke of Wellington led the British army to victory over the French and expelled them from Spain. Goya was commissioned to paint the Duke’s portrait and it is included here and – seen close to – is a much more rushed and bodged looking affair than I remembered (look at the hanging right eye, look at the ineptly done mouth). Compare and contrast Goya’s amateurish work with the superb portrait of Wellington by British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence just three years later – a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait.

Alas for Goya and Spanish liberals, the restored Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, turned out to be as reactionary as the soon-to-be-restored Bourbons in France. He swiftly restored the Inquisition, its spies and secret police and Goya had to undergo inquisition and ‘rehabilitation’ for his earlier contacts with the French regime. Doubts about his loyalty persisted and in 1824 Goya was forced first to go into hiding and then to flee to France, to join the community of Spanish emigrés in Bordeaux, where he died in 1828.

The portraits

I thought the great majority of the portraits were amateurish, badly composed and badly executed. Even the audio commentary had to concede there are elements of ‘naivety’, ‘awkwardness’, ‘inelegance’ in many of the paintings. He was nearly 40 when he painted the group portrait below. The composition is clumsy. The commentary points out the table only has one leg. Perspective and colour emphasise flatness and not depth. Some of the faces seem in a different plane or level than others. The old bloke at the table is very badly done.

Here is Goya, aged 40, doing a portrait of the king – the king – which looks like a cartoon and makes the king look like a rascally yokel. I don’t understand how this can be said to be the work of a ‘master’ of painting. The digs, the gun, the boots are typical of the period. But the face?

The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their Children is a terrible picture, isn’t it? The stagey pose, the inability to draw the human figure or face, the ineptness of the children’s poses and faces. This is one of the exhibition’s coups, a loan from the prestigious Prado in Madrid. It looks like some of the primitive American colonial art I saw at the Brooklyn Museum last year.

Below is a well-known self portrait from the 1790s. The commentary points out that the window may or may not have existed in this form in Goya’s studio, but it is anyway symbolic of the light flooding in from the 18th century Enlightenment. Maybe so, but close up you can see the shakiness of the brush strokes throughout and the indecisiveness of the features.

The Duchess of Alba was an important patron and the work below is a famous painting, chosen to head the National Gallery’s twitter feed. But the background looks unreal, there is no connection between the background and the figure dumped in it and her face is dire, oddly modelled and blank. She is pointing at an inscription in the sand which says ‘Solo Goya’ ie ‘Only Goya’, which sentimental old art historians used to think proved she and Goya were lovers. More realistic modern critics think it is simply a reference to Goya considering himself the best portrait painter in Spain.

Charles III died in 1788 and his successor, Charles IV, promoted Goya to be court painter. Goya, presumably keen to display his absolute powers, produced this portrait of the king as hunter. A reproduction makes it look much more finished than it is in real life, especially the repainting around the dog’s head to make him look more adoringly at his master.

The portrait of the Marchioness of Santa Cruz reflects the early 19th century fashion for portraying sitters – generally women – as classical personifications. Here the marchioness, with her hand on a lute, is portraying a classical muse. This reproduction smooths out the rough brush strokes and makes the silk dress and fabric of the couch look well done; they look a lot less so in real life. Her face is as blankly expressionless, as bereft of life, as the Duchess of Alba’s.

After the defeat of Napoleon, King Ferdinand VII was restored to the Spanish throne and brought back all the reactionary institutions of his forebears. Despite Goya’s known sympathies for the French regime, Ferdinand kept him on as court painter, though appointing a more traditionalist painter (Vicente López) to accompany him. It is hard to understand how a proud and dignified king can possibly have accepted this official portrait from Goya without insisting it was burned. It makes him look like a tubby cretin.

Some good paintings

It is unfortunate that the first room, full of early works, rather overwhelms you with how poor Goya was as a draughtsman and painter. Thus prepared it was easy to see faults in everything which followed. But I was pleasantly surprised to see about half a dozen works I thought were good, and one or two that might be very good, that almost stand comparison with Gainsborough, Reynolds or Thomas Lawrence.

This portrait of the Count of Altamira has a unity of colour and composition which I found uncommon in most of the other exhibits, although the audio commentary chose it as an example of the way that Goya almost always has something quirky or ungainly or clumsy in his paintings (I couldn’t agree more). In this case the chair is evidently too small for the table and the sitter’s body isn’t quite sitting on it, but sort of hovering just above.

The portrait of the Countess-Duchess of Benavente reminded me of Gainsborough. She was, apparently, an intellectual in her day, famous for her salon, but the commentary went on mostly about her hair and how the four large folds at the back were probably created using a sort of cardboard onto which human hair was stuck before the assemblage was attached to the back of her head with hairpins. Once they’d drawn attention to this area it became impossible not to notice the way the hat isn’t really sitting on her head, but looks tacked on behind it.

The Duke of Carlos (1815) Chief Minister of the reactionary Ferdinand VII, from the feet upwards this is a believable and impressive portrait of power.

Goya’s friends

The exhibition very much follows the highs and lows in Goya’s personal life, dwelling on the illness in the 1790s which left him profoundly deaf, and referring to the albums of cartoons and sketches in which he kept satirical images of the court and of humanity in general. It has two rooms devoted to portraits of family and close friends which, as with anyone’s life story, introduce an element of pathos.

Antonia Zárate (1805) A close friend of the artist, her face has the same blankness of many other female portraits, there’s something wrong with the top lip and the dress hangs oddly on her bust and shoulders but still, a striking pose.

Friar Juan Fernández de Rojas (1800?) A personal friend of the artist and progressive theologian, this is one of the few really persuasive portraits in the show.

Martín Zapater (1797) Goya’s lifelong friend and correspondent, this portrait has more depth than all the kings put together.

The commentary told us about his relationship with Dr Arrieta, who nursed Goya through a severe illness in 1819. These and the other moving stories about his wife’s death, about the loss of most of his children, may all be true and raise some sympathy. But surely none of that stops Goya’s painting of himself and Arrieta from being anything other than embarrassingly amateurish. The idea of fellowship, care and support may be humane and worthy – but the execution…

I am grateful to the National Gallery for assembling all these works in one place and allowing us to take a really detailed overview of Goya’s career. But I would expect a ‘master’ to have created at least one ‘masterpiece’, a work you can only marvel at, a work that seems created by angels, that you could stand anyone in front of and say, ‘There! That is Western Art at its finest’. Although there are quite a few ‘interesting’ portraits and a handful of fairly good ones, there are no paintings here that take your breath away.

Popular

This is the biggest exhibition of Impressionist art in London for 20 years. It was packed. There was a long queue well before it opened at 10am and by 11am it was difficult to see the paintings without people in the way.

The commentary, booklet, audioguide and wall panels all emphasised how revolutionary Impressionism was and what a complete break it represented with official French Salon art (all true enough – there was some dull pre-Impressionist art here to compare it with). But nothing really addressed the more obvious point: why is Impressionist art so incredibly popular today? Why are paintings, once ridiculed as the inept daubs of idiots and incompetents, now sold for tens of millions and plastered over countless chocolate box lids, calendars, posters etc?

Is it because: Impressionist art is colourful and naive, it doesn’t require a knowledge of classical myth or history, it doesn’t depict the intimidatingly rich and powerful, and it is mostly set in a generalised rural idyll – sunshine on fields of poppies and ponds full of lilies? Because it is an escape from anything solid, defined, intellectual or demanding?

Paul Durand-Ruel

The show isn’t actually about Impressionism the art movement: it is about one man – the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. A pretty convincing case is made for him being the inventor or gofather of Impressionism, the man who bought up the early works of all the major Impressionists, as well as organising one-man shows for the artists, opening galleries in Paris and later, America, to showcase their works, paying the poorer ones salaries to allow them to work, whose efforts pretty much single-handedly enabled many of the painters to survive and flourish, who helped to create the narrative that Impressionism is the founding movement of Modern Art and who, along the way, invented many of the methods which underpin the modern art market. A really impressive achievement.

Thus the first room features large wall-size photos of Durand-Ruel’s living room in Paris, liberally hung with the great paintings he owned, and the curators have tried to reunite as many of them as possible to recreate the scene. Similarly, the last room contains photos of the key 1905 Grafton exhibition in London and, again, the curators have tried to hang a lot of paintings from that exhibition in the same space.

This exhibition is not a history of the theory or practice of Impressionism. It is about how one man more than any other spotted it, identified it, funded and sustained it, marketed and promoted it, defined and made it what we think it is today.

Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market

To quote the guide, when Durand-Ruel took over his father’s art dealership in 1865 he immediately began applying the techniques of high finance: he found backers and partners for his purchases, sought exclusivity deals, worked to push up prices at auction and brought his product before the public at carefully staged group and one-man shows.

For example, when he was introduced to Manet in his studio, he bought all the available paintings on the spot – 23 paintings in one day – for 35,000 francs (nearly 40 times the pay of the average French worker). By cornering the market (in admittedly unpopular artists) he realised he could leak them onto the market at inflated prices.

The one-man show

In 1883 Durand-Ruel pioneered the idea of the one-man art show, staging a series of month-long, solo exhibitions by Boudin, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley. He ensured they were retrospectives ie showed the progression or evolution in the artist’s style, and accompanied the shows with advertising campaigns, provided images for the Press to print and publicise, and hosted lavish private views to encourage wealthy buyers.

Selling the ‘series’

This led naturally to collaboration with Monet on his ‘series’ paintings ie when Monet set about painting series of versions of the same subject. One of the first was the Poplar Series, 24 canvases of a set of poplar trees on the bend in the Epte river. In February 1892 Durand-Ruel displayed 15 of them in his gallery, facilitating their critical reception and their sale. Five of Monet’s poplar paintings are brought together here, in one of those recreations beloved of curators.

30 years ago I hitch-hiked to Rouen just to see the facade of the cathedral which Monet had painted in a series of paintings which I worshipped as a schoolboy. The paintings magically capture the imposing architecture in the differing light of different times of day. But now, all the poplar tree paintings in this exhibition left me cold. Either I’ve changed or this poplar series is just not as good. The reproduction below makes the source painting seem much smoother and more finished than it is in real life. In the flesh all the poplar paintings seemed to me lumpy and bumpy and unconvincing.

Apart from all the other factors – could the enduring popularity of the Impressionists have something to do with the fact that the reproductions – in posters, calendars, chocolate boxes, biscuit tin lids etc – render small and smooth and seamless images which, when seen in the flesh, and much much larger, are surprisingly pock-marked and blodgy?

Bad paintings

In fact, the show contains an unusually large number of bad paintings. I certainly learned a lot about Durand-Ruel and the birth of art marketing, but an unintended outcome of the show was to make me feel quite a lot of sympathy for the early critics of Impressionism. Quotes from these poor benighted souls are printed large on the walls and included in the wall panels for our derision: what philistines! How could they not recognise the shimmering wonders of Monet’s water lilies?

Well, because a lot of the recognised masterpieces of Impressionism weren’t created for another 10, 20 or 30 years. All the critics could do was react to the paintings put in front of them in 1872, 1874, 1876 – and as this exhibition conclusively proves, a lot of these were genuinely poor, in terms of composition and technique.

Even the audioguide admitted that at first glance Green Park, London by Claude Monet looks so bad it might have been painted by a child. Hanging Out The Laundry To Dry (1875) by Berthe Morisot: is this not an amaterush ‘daub’? I thought I was an unquestioning fan of Dégas – the show features the fabulous Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando and a number of so-so ballet studies – but this show revealed how many bad and awkward paintings he made, as well: Horses before the stands may be famous but I find it gawky and unappealing; and surely Peasant Girls Bathing In The Sea At Dusk is just really bad.

The final room is dominated by a full length portrait of Eva Gonzalès, herself an artist, by Manet (1870). I’ve been spoilt by recently visiting exhibitions of portraits by John Singer Sargent and beautiful late-Victorian female portraiture at the Leighton House Museum – in comparison with those artists, I thought this was a poor painting – look at the face, the heart of any portrait, look at those bug eyes.

Nonetheless, Eva Gonzalès starred in a ground-breaking exhibition Durand-Ruel organised at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1905. It was curated with his usual entrepreneurial flair, arranged to tell the story of how the movement evolved from tentative early steps, then burst into maturity with masterpieces by Dégas, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir et al.

The 1905 show had far-reaching influence in this country, helping to popularise the loose sunlit approach to subject matter and style, and establishing Impressionism as the forebear of all Modern Art. I know people who not only loathe Impressionism but hate the way its continuing dominance overshadows far more interesting developments which took place in other European countries, specifically Germany and Scandinavia.

Good paintings

I found a lot of the Impressionist works on display here surprisingly poor. Many of them really did look like the unfinished daubs contemporary critics castigated. But with around 80 paintings on show, there were, of course, plenty of others which are a joy to see.

I think Renoir emerged as the most consistent artist here: he crystallised his vision early on and thereafter poured forth an apparently limitless number of chocolate box people in sunny settings. His Parisians socialising in the open air, his portraits of smiling women and children, his dancing couples, all have an indisputably lovely life and colour to them.

Impressionism was about taking the train out of Paris to the still-unspoilt suburbs with newly-available tubes of ready-mixed oil paints, and painting in the open air, and so there are a lot of depictions of Paris’s suburbs, maybe touched with slight signs of industrialism, with railway bridges or distant factory chimneys. Not too much, though.

This work by Sisley. Daub or not? Does the light airy sunlit feel compensate for the lack of finish and draughtsmanship? Does the blue sky compensate for the bridge looking wonky? I like clear lines and solid draughtsmanship so, for me, No. For other people, who respond to the overall feel and warm impression an image evokes in them, well, Yes.

And there were plenty of blurry landscapes by Pissarro or Monet, including several old favourites which are part of the National Gallery’s regular collection, a number depicting London during the artists’ exiles here to escape the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Easy-going nostalgic reminders of what London looked like in the halcyon fantasy-land these artists created and which so many of us harken back to.

What I liked

Ezra Pound said that, at the end of the day, all a critic can do is point at something and say ‘I like that’ and then attempt to explain why. I was surprised how many of the paintings on display here I actively disliked. It was a genuine revelation how poor some of the paintings by all these famous names turn out to be.

More or less the only work I really liked – that I could imagine having in my house and seeing every day – was St Paul’s from the Surrey Side by Charles-François Daubigny (1817-78), a predecessor of the Impressionists. Not a blue-skied escapist landscape but the big bad city under no illusions. Below is a dark and rather misleading reproduction of it; in the flesh it felt deeper and more evocative. It looks forward to Whistler‘s later impressions of London.

Though blurry, though painted en plein air, it still has an underlying accuracy of draughtsmanship and confidence of line which is what I enjoy in art and found missing in so many of the other paintings on show here.

Could the success of the Impressionists not only be down to the fact that their paintings reproduce very well across the range of products and channels the twentieth century invented – but that their rivals and predecessors, the official Salon artists’ works, reproduce very badly, often looking as dark and dingy as the misleading reproduction above?

This is one of the most purely didactic exhibitions I’ve been to. Usually, the curators tell you lots about the movement or biography of whoever’s featured, but you are essentially left to decide whether you enjoy the art by yourself.

Making Colour is more like a lecture, or a short degree course, compressed into half a dozen rooms. It is a fascinating, thorough and rather exhausting explanation of how coloured oil paints were and are made, where the raw ingredients came from in medieval and renaissance Europe, and then how discoveries by chemists throughout the 19th century introduced new shades and tones to the artist’s palette which are still in use today.

There are several strands or themes:

The growth in scientific understanding of how the human eye sees colour, how it is detected by the cones and rods in our retinas – there is a short film about perception in a cinema to one side of the gallery, which goes into colour blindness and the dramatic difference the ambient light we see a painting in has on our perception of it: thought-provoking as, for most of their history most of these paintings will have been seen either by partial daylight or candlelight – certainly not by the flat fluorescent light of modern galleries.

Theories of colour ie how colours complement each other. It was only in the late 1600s that Isaac Newton broke white light up into the spectrum, and placed the study of light and colours on a scientific basis. Various art theorists produced lists or descriptions of spectrums, often arranged into colour wheels.

The Natural System of Colours Wherein is displayed the regular and beautiful Order and Arrangement, Arising from the Three Premitives [sic], Red, Blue and Yellow, The manner in which each colour is formed, and its Composition…Moses Harris, 1769/1776

Complementary colours Apparently, the most influential work on colour was published by the dyer Michel Eugène Chevreul in 1839, not only containing colour wheels but systematically showing how colours opposite each other on the wheel complement or enhance each other. These ideas had a big impact on the Impressionists and post-Impressionists and the show demonstrates how with two very different paintings embodying the theory.

Renoir’s The Skiff (1875) deliberately contrasts blues of sky and river, with the vibrant orange of the boat. You can see from the colour wheel above that these colours are directly opposite each other, and this helps understand why the colours of both seem so bright and vibrant. (The other example is Van Gogh’s Crabs, see below.)

Chemistry Turns out to have played a vital role: during the 19th century industrial chemists in particular were researching ways of generating effective dyes etc for industrial purposes and these discoveries – often complete accidents – were quickly translated into new shades available as paints. Thus Renoir is using two new paints, cobalt blue and chrome orange, which were invented in the 19th century.

Paint availability Until the mid-1700s painters had to mix powdered pigments with either oil or egg themselves, to create the paint they were going to use. This was a fiddly business and not suited to doing outdoors where paint often dried too quickly and so almost all painting was done inside, in studios or churches etc. In the mid-1700s there was a breakthrough of sorts when ready-mixed paints became available in pig’s bladders, allowing greater outdoor painting. But it was not till the mid-1800s that ready-mixed paints became available in tin tubes which were light and easy to transport anywhere.

This technical breakthrough in paint’s portability and convenience contributed to the movement in France to paint out of doors, the movement which came to be known as Impressionism.

A room per colour

How to tackle such a massive subject? Well, the National Gallery has given a room to each of the major colours and in that room explains the history of how those colours were made, from earliest times. And each of these colour rooms has a selection from the full breadth of the National Gallery’s collection, illustrating the different shades of blue, red, green etc as actually applied by the world’s greatest painters in a wide selection of paintings from the 1400s to around 1900.

A personal selection

Rather than rewrite the entire exhibition catalogue, I’ve made a personal selection of favourite paintings, with what they tell us about the sources and uses of colours in their time.

Purple This medieval painting is used to demonstrate a few aspects of colour. 1. It was part of an altar piece on public display in a church, therefore the brightness of the colours helps bring out the clarity of the composition, making the image easier to read (almost like a cartoon). 2. The image uses purple, usually associated with royalty, for the executioner’s dress. At this early period purple was made by mixing ultramarine with red ‘lakes’ and white.

Blue This is a stunning use of the main source of blue in the early Modern period, ultramarine. As the name indicates this was sourced from lapis lazuli rock mined in what is now Afghanistan and brought to Europe along trade routes. By the time it reached Europe this material was more expensive than gold, and is therefore an indication of the wealth of the sponsor of the painting. Its value led to its association with the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven.

But these raw pigments could only be converted into paint by mixing with a medium of which there were two common ones:

The stunning blue of this painting is testament to Sassoferrato’s mastery of the techniques of mixing as much as to his eye and ability at composition.

History of blue Early painters who couldn’t afford ultramarine used Azurite, cheaper but with a greenish hue, or smalt, a blue glass pigment, more affordable but unstable. In the early 18th century Prussian blue was discovered and could be manufactured in bulk, but ultramarine remained the gold standard of blues. In the early 1800s a method was developed for creating a synthetic cobalt blue, and then an artificial version of ultramarine was developed: French ultramarine is still used to this day.

Sassoferrato – The Virgin in Prayer1640-50, Oil on canvas73 x 57.7 cmCredit Line: The National Gallery, London

Yellow Yellow was sourced either from earth ochres or or from compounds of lead tin and antimony. In this Gainsborough from 1756 the dress of the painter’s daughter on the right is done with a shade called Naples yellow, mixed with lead white to create the lighter areas. The panel tells us Gainsborough mixed it well and it has lasted, but Naples yellow contained impurities that, over time, can turn orange or even pink.

The show includes the paintbox of JMW Turner, found in his studio after his death in 1851. It is a fascinating insight into the actual practical tools of the painter’s trade, showing the pigment bottles and the oils he used to mix them with. Incredible to believe Turner created his marvellous, transcendent works with such a small range of pigments available to him.

Green Green was sourced from verdigris, a kind of clay, or from green earth, a tarnishing of copper. It is fascinating to learn that Renaissance painters often used green earth in particular as the underlay for skin, but the whites and pinks painted on top sometimes fade to reveal the underlay and this is why the faces of many renaissance paintings have a greenish tinge. Later artists were able to take advantage of the inventions of emerald green and viridian.

This stunning painting by Van Gogh of two crabs is used to show a) the vibrant greens and ready-made oil paints available to a late Victorian artist and b) the artist’s application of colour theory. As well as the depiction of its subject, it is a study in complementary colours, for the vivid greens of the background lie opposite the reddy oranges on the colour wheel.

It is striking to see how the same colour theory has been applied with radically different results by Renoir (1875) and van Gogh (1889). Figurative though the image is, it’s clear that for van Gogh experimenting with colour has become the prime focus. He is quoted as saying, ‘a painter had better start from the colours on his palette rather than the colours of Nature’, and that sounds.

Right at the end of the 19th century Dégas was experimenting with colour as this fantasia in red demonstrates. It uses bright red vermilion for the dress and curtain, along with red lead and orange-red, with Venetian reds for the background and the brusher’s blouse made from red ‘lakes’ mixed with white.

The painting can be analysed in terms of colour theory, in terms of the way the actual available paints have been mixed by the artist. Also biographically, as towards the end of his life Dégas was losing his sight before going completely blind, and the intensity of the reds is possible over-compensation for his failing sight. And psychologically, for the contrast between the theoretically relaxing atmosphere of a woman having her hair combed, contrasting with the emotional impact the image actually makes on the spectator, of the scene being somehow intense and highly charged.

Conclusion

Most people, me included, stroll round a gallery or exhibition deciding whether I like something on the basis of its subject matter, or on its immediate visual impact, its form and design.

The take-home message from this thorough and fascinating exhibition is that there is a huge extra dimension to art appreciation, a whole realm of appreciation based on a real understanding of the physical components of a painting; of the actual paints, the colours and pigments – and the theory of colours – which were available to the artist, which makes the attempt to understand their achievements a lot more complicated and demanding.

Introduction

Some 70 portraits from turn-of-the-century Vienna have been collected at the National Gallery to give insight into both the genre of ‘the portrait’ and into this famously creative time and place. The exhibition features not only heavy-hitters like Kokoschka, Klimt and Schiele but a host of less-well-known artists, including several women, to provide a really rounded ‘portrait’ of the era. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent audioguide voiced by novelist Esther Freud, great grand-daughter of Sigmund.

From 1867 to 1918 Vienna was capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of the largest countries in Europe, comprising over 11 national groups. In the second half of the century a new middle class emerged, wealthy from banking and manufacturing, a notable percentage of whom were Jews, often recent immigrants to the city. This ‘New Vienna’ class used portraiture for a number of purposes, to establish themselves, to announce their wealth, their place in Society, their education and connection with the Arts.

But as the century headed to its end the atmosphere turned darker with the rise of nationalist movements throughout the Empire, increasing attacks on the ‘cosmopolitan’ ie Jewish nouveaux riches and on decadent, often Jewish, artists. The election of the right-wing Karl Lüger as Mayor in 1897 marks a decisive moment in the rise of official anti-semitism. Very neatly, the same year saw the founding by one of the city’s leading artists, Gustav Klimt, of the Secession Movement of Modern Art.

The position of Jews became increasingly stressful. The high suicide among Jewish young men prompted Freud to convene a psycho-analytic conference devoted to the subject. In the noughties and tens Vienna was a troubled, conflicted place…

Old Vienna

The exhibition opens with a room dedicated to an exhibition which took place in 1905, dedicated to portraits from the first half of the 19th century. It presented ‘Old Vienna’ in its reassuring Victorian solidity. Seeing a dozen or so traditional figurative portraits gathered together like this makes you realise how boring, how stiflingly dull, these worthy paintings were. The outstanding figure was Hans Makart (1880-84) the city’s most celebrated artist, brought from Hungary to Vienna by the Emperor himself, where he established a great reputation for his sumptuously realistic portraits of the highest society figures. The reproduction below doesn’t do justice to the tremendously lush, thick, countoured surface of the oil in this wonderful Portrait of Clothilde Beer (1878). The rich deep velvet red became known as ‘Makart red’ after him.

Portrait of Clothilde Beer by Hans Makart, 1878 (Wikimedia Commons)

Structure of the exhibition

The exhibition is arranged in six rooms which address themes such as The Family and The Child, the Appeal of The Artist, The New Viennese, Love and Loss, Finish and Failure. See more on the National Gallery website. In contrast, I am going to review it artist by artist:

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Gustav Klimt‘s life was coterminous with the Empire itself. He was a stunning virtuoso. The Lady in Black looks like a photograph. the commentary says ‘even today her sleeves are thrilling to behold’!

Lady in Black by Gustav Klimt (1894)

It is comparable to the fabulous portrait of the Empress Elizabeth by Benczur with its stunning, John Singer Sargeant-ish sumptousness.

The Empress Elizabeth by von Gyula Benczur (1899)

But within a few years Klimt had developed his more highly worked style in which the figure stands in a flat plane covered in decorative mosaics of circles and squares until, in the later figures, clothes become fully intertwined with the backgrounds, epitomised by the famous Kiss. The exhibition only has a few Klimts, including the haunting unfinished portrait of Ria Munk, a rich man’s daughter who shot herself after a failed lover affair.

Ria Munk by Gustav Klimt, 1913-18 (Wikimedia Commons)

Richard Gerstl (1883-1908)

At the first of The Rest Is Noise weekends, on Vienna 1900, held in January 2013, we heard the story of how the painter Gerstl had an affair with the composer Arnold Schoenberg’s wife, who ultimately returned to her husband, shortly after which the painter hanged himself. It is a story emblematic of the highly-strung milieu of Austrian Expressionism. But I’d never seen his paintings. They are intense and disturbing, including this, the first nude self-portrait in the history of Viennese art.

Nude self portrait by Richard Gerstl, 1908 (Wikimedia Commons)

A matter of days after this painting was completed Gerstly hanged himself.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Schoenberg is one of the two giants of 20th century music for his invention of twelve-tone or serial music which came to dominate the middle of the century. But he was also an amateur painter of an Expressionist bent, who prided himself on his lack of formal training. This does give his paintings a combination of naive style with haunting intensity.

Blue self-portrait by Arnold Schoenberg, 1910

Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980)

Kokoschka has four or five paintings in the display, including the fabulous double portrait of music critics Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat.

Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat by Oskar Kokoschka (1909)

Vienna hated Kokoschka. Critics said his art was decadent, degenerate; that you could only going to a Kokoschka exhibition if you had already survived the onslaught of syphilis.

Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

Schiele may be my favourite artist. He created utterly new, modern, hieratic poses for the body, reminiscent of the non-Romantic choreography Nijinsky developed for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913). And a painting style made of broad strokes dividing the canvas into crushed rectangles, which also involved a systematic deformation of the human figure, which becomes uncannily elongated, with spatulate fingers and oddly blank animal eyes complementing the unnatural poses to create images of overpowering intensity. No reproduction can convey the overpowering size and primeval power of the original painting. It’s worth visiting the exhibition just for this.

The Family by Egon Schiele (1918)

The painting of Edith, Schiele’s wife, in a green top, is among my favourite works of art. I had never seen the powerful pen portrait he made of her as she lay dying of the Spanish flu at the end of the Great War. It is powerfully reminiscent of Wyndham Lewis’s sharp-edged portraits. She was six months pregnant when she died. Egon died three days later.

Portrait of the dying Edith Schiele, 1918 (Wikimedia Commons)

The end

The exhibition ends with a room titled Finish and Failure, tying together Austro-Hungary’s defeat in the Great War, the disintegration of the Empire into a number of smaller countries, the collapse of its ruling family and class, eerily accompanied by the deaths in the same year of its two most famous artists, Klimt and Schiele. The room focuses on Klimt’s portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, a rich Christina who converted to Judaism to marry a Jew and commissioned Klimt to paint her. Her marriage failed, her country collapsed, Klimt died before he could finish her portrait, and 20 years later, she was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Thereisenstadt concentration camp where she was murdered.

If pre-War Vienna was a culture holding irreconcilable forces in an anxious balance, some of those forces were to turn out to be very, very dark indeed.

Amalie Zuckerkandl by Gustav Klimt 1918 (Wikimedia Commons)

A footnote on chronology The audioguide referred to Vienna around 1900. But although Klimt founded the Secession in 1897, most of the paintings here are from the late noughties, from 1908, 09, 10 and on through the Great War. It is breath-taking to think that, while this highly developed and psychological piercing art was being produced in Vienna, Edwardian England, in wholesale reaction against Aestheticism, laboured under the horrible daubs of the Camden Town group and could at best produce the milk and water modernism of the Crisis of Brilliance group.